The Mapping Inequality Project: From Covert to Overt Racism
The Mapping Inequality Project seeks to make structural racism more visible by digitizing redlined housing maps created by the Federal Government in the early 20th century.
By Joshua Jordan
Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.
(America never was America to me.)
I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.
—Langston Hughes, “Let America be America Again”
“Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the negro a bad check, a check which has been marked ‘insufficient funds.’”
—MLK, “I Have a Dream” speech
The area in NE Minneapolis that today houses Bethune Park—near N Humboldt Ave and Plymouth Ave N—was once described by government officials working for the HOLC (Home Owners’ Loan Corporation) as having a population consisting of a “poorer class of Jew and colored people.” In part due to this “underclass” of residents, as well as the so-called poor physical conditions surrounding them, the neighborhood was labeled as red—being “very difficult to place the valuation; and it is a most undesirable location for residential purposes.”
Follow the Mississippi east to St Paul, and when you get to the Capitol Heights and South of Maryland neighborhoods, you see that government officials described this area as, “a rapidly declining district which has seen its best days.” Why? In part, because the property values are poor and because “Italians, colored people, Jews of the lower strata and other people of foreign descent of the lower classes reside here.”
This is called redlining, government-created maps in which neighborhoods across the United States were rated on a sliding scale—green being most desirable and red being least desirable. Depending on how the neighborhood was appraised (i.e., how its residents were perceived by outsiders), neighborhoods were then sectioned off by color (for lack of a better word) on literal maps.
Green neighborhoods were homogenous and white. Red neighborhoods were predominantly Black.
The Mapping Inequality Project: Exposing racial and class segregation in the New Deal
Last month on March 4, the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) launched the Environmental Justice and Systemic Racism speaker series. Featured first was The Mapping Inequality Project, a “game changing project” co-created by professors Robert Nelson and LaDale Winling that has provided the public with digitized versions of important government-related housing documents from more than eighty years ago.
“This unique collaboration,” according to the advert, “created a foundational resource for unprecedented research, education, organizing, and policy advocacy on redlining and current environmental challenges.”
The housing documents in question are from when government employees working for the HOLC (Home Owners’ Loan Corporation) in the 1930s and 1940s were routinely rating the value of neighborhoods.
In essence, “HOLC staff members, using data and evaluations organized by local real estate professionals—lenders, developers, and real estate appraisers—in each city, assigned grades to residential neighborhoods that reflected their ‘mortgage security’ that would then be visualized on color-coded maps.” Neighborhoods receiving the highest grade of ‘A—colored green on the maps—were deemed minimal risks for banks and other mortgage lenders when they were determining who should receive loans and which areas in the city were safe investments. Those receiving the lowest grade of ‘D,’ colored red, were considered ‘hazardous.’”
As mentioned above, HOLC employees relied on a range of documents when assigning a value to neighborhoods. Key to this thought process was that “real estate appraisers used the apparent racial and cultural value of a community to determine its economic value.”
As pointed out by The Mapping Inequality Project, the HOLC and other government agencies helped to “codify and expand practices of racial and class segregation.” This then led to “rampant real estate speculation and environmental degradation.”
Now in 2021, about 200 cities’ worth of these color-coded maps—ranging from the Twin Cities to Oakland to Philadelphia to Savannah, Georgia—have been digitized, allowing us to see them in one big digital map. In doing so, The Mapping Inequality Project seeks to offer “a window into the New Deal era housing policies that helped set the course for contemporary America.” It presents a “new view, and perhaps even a new language, for describing the relationship between wealth and poverty in America.”
HOLC and targeted discrimination against Black Americans
As explained by Mehrsa Baradaran in The Color of Money, a book detailing the government-created racial wealth gap between Black Americans and white Americans, the HOLC was established in 1933 and “permanently changed mortgage lending in the United States by simplifying and streamlining home mortgage.” How did they do this? In part by institutionalizing racism through “an almost categorical exclusion of black’s from government subsidies.”
Normally, the creditworthiness of a buyer would seem to be one of the most important factors in a bank’s lending decision. But was it? No, the race of the borrower, in fact, was the most prominent factor!
Most important to banks when considering loans is whether they can profit from lending to you (i.e., how risky you are). When HOLC officials set out to rate neighborhoods, race, as already mentioned, was used as a proxy for the desirability of a given neighborhood, and the more “desirable” a neighborhood—the more white it was—the less risky it was for the bank to lend to (would be) homeowners in this area.
Irrational and pernicious preconceived notions lead us down a dark path. The HOLC was reinforcing the racist hegemony of Black inferiority by institutionalizing racial segregation that “made it a formal feature of the mortgage credit markets.” As a result, it created and sustained ghettos—Black Americans, and for a time other minority groups, who were unable to build capital and wealth through home investments (a primary factor in wealth accumulation) and who were trapped in “undesirable” neighborhoods associated with “rapid decline.”
This is still with us today. It hasn’ gone away.
What does rapid decline look like? It looks like Akron, Ohio, and Richmond, California, which we’ll take a closer look at below in the context of the EPA and environmental racism.
But first, let’s turn to the most iconic hard-fought victories toward Black equality, some of which we’re supposed to hear (read: supposed to detract from the work we still have left to do) and others which we’re not supposed to hear.
What we hear: The people’s fight for equality
We hear about the Montgomery Bus Boycott that took place from 1955-1956, most notably associated with Civil Rights activist Rosa Parks (who, remember, was a committed activist and member of the Montgomery chapter of the NAACP since 1943 and who helped to organize “The Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor” in 1944.)
We hear about the “I Have a Dream Speech” by MLK at the March on Washington in 1963.
We hear about the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which “is labor law legislation that outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.”
We hear about the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which “offered African Americans a way to get around the barriers at the state and local levels that had prevented them from exercising their 15th Amendment right to vote.” (See also HR1 currently being discussed.)
We hear about the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which “[made] it unlawful to refuse to sell, rent to, or negotiate with any person because of that person's inclusion in a protected class.” (Though perhaps less emphasized may be what had just happened: the assassination of MLK.)
What we don’t hear: The government’s fight for inequality
We don’t hear about the 1862 Homestead Act, which “encouraged Western migration by providing settlers 160 acres of public land.” Western migration by whom? Surely not by the just-freed enslaved Africans with little to no resources!
We don’t hear about the 1860s mismanagement of the Freedmen’s Bank (created specifically for Black Americans but chaired by white Americans until Frederick Douglass assumed leadership and had no choice but to close it down), which led to the disappearance of “More than half of accumulated black wealth,” as explained in The Color of Money.
We don’t hear about the racial housing covenants, such as those discussed in The Sum of Us, which were overtly or covertly sanctioned by the government:
Buchanan v. Warley (1917), in which the Supreme Court finally “invalidated city ordinances banning Black people from buying property in white neighborhoods”
Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), in which the Supreme Court banned the enforcement of racial covenants in housing, but left room for discrimination “under the pretext of credit risk (which we saw above is irrational)
Village of Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development (1977), in which the Supreme court “failed to recognize that [the bannings of exclusionary zoning based on race] were racial bans recast in class terms”
And finally, the topic of our discussion, touched on by The Mapping Inequality Project and in The Color of Money: we don’t hear about the racist history of the The New Deal, which birthed the “invisible Jim Crow credit market” in which government systemically helped to create the white middle class to the exclusion of Black Americans—doing so through ‘“white affirmative action.’”
We see how the HOLC and the New Deal, more broadly, exploited Black Americans and created the very conditions that predisposed them to fail financially. By being barred from upward mobility into nicer neighborhoods, the EPA further exploited Black Americans who were locked into the degraded, “rapidly declining” ones.
The EPA confronts environmental racism and “rapid decline”
As the The Mapping Inequality Project speaker is presenting me with redlined maps during their presentation over Microsoft Teams, they flip to Akron, Ohio, then to the Bay Area, California—both cities that represent the deadly health consequences of living in redlined neighborhoods that were further exploited through lax environmental standards. (In fact, a small section of one neighborhood presented to us was sectioned off because it was predominantly Black, while the rest of the neighborhood was deemed “desirable.” The same neighborhood!)
The Goodrich tire company has been a mainstay in Akron, Ohio, for a century. This is great for the local economy. The problem, however, is that burning rubber has very real consequences on the environment and the health of those who live nearby. We have to be careful not to infer causation without evidence to substantiate the claim, but the presenters were clear that there is a correlation between redlined neighborhoods in Akron and higher incidences of asthma.
Rapid decline.
Perhaps another incidence, from Heather McGhee’s The Sum of Us, can help to illuminate how environmental racism works.
McGhee tells us that Richmond was once at the center of WWII manufacturing. But today it shares a space with a massive, miles-wide Chevron oil refinery, along with 349 other toxic sites.
Though Richmond was a popular destination for jobs and thus housing during WWII, not everyone had an equal opportunity to secure these jobs and housing.
Once then-available living quarters in Richmond reached capacity, more living quarters were built. Great, right? Not quite. The FHA—the Federal Housing Authority, one of many a government agency created during the New Deal—“guaranteed the developer’s financing on the condition that none of of the seven hundred new homes be sold to anyone ‘not wholly of the Caucasian race.’”
As such, Black newcomers were forced into a filthy, unincorporated and unregulated area in Richmond that was farther north—without roads, streetlights, water, or sewage.
As McGhee unfortunately points out, “The lines of opportunity and place that racist government policy drew in the mid-1940s remain in Richmond to this day,” which is 97 percent Black. Since the end of the war, the once-thriving town has been left with “few middle-class jobs and lots of toxic pollution.”
There’s a litany of depressing statistics associated with Richmond, such as bad air quality and low student performance. But most disturbing is the reality that, like most of us who can’t just up and leave on a whim merely because it would be nice to do, Richmond residents don’t have an escape. The doctors overwhelmingly attribute, according to community members, the death of local elders to cancer.
We have to be careful about inferring causation, but the presence of “salvage lots, tankers, freight cars, a massive garbage dump . . . and so many factories making pesticides and other chemicals” is hard to ignore.
Again, rapid decline.
The EPA, which exists separately from The Mapping Inequality Project, seeking to address redlining and current environmental challenges sounds nice, though it also sounds like code for them admitting their culpability in the “rampant real estate speculation and environmental degradation” mentioned earlier.
The EPA admitting its guilt, even if cryptically, is great. But it doesn’t absolve them of their crime. Here’s why: The EPA added insult to injury by exploiting so-called “undesirable” neighborhoods.
Rampant real estate speculation, environmental degradation, and rapid decline, then, is the unfortunate reality of the government—the sacred entity meant to protect our fundamental rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, not destroy them—working to “codify and expand practices of racial and class segregation.”
Insufficient funds from MLK to today
Far from touting a so-called colorblind philosophy, as many today would have you believe, here’s what MLK said in his 1963 “I have a Dream Speech”:
“In a sense we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed ‘unalienable Rights’ of ‘Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America as given the negro a bad check, a check which has been marked ‘insufficient funds.’”
MLK gave voice to Black Americans who were never—and still haven’t been—fulfilled by the United States’ promise of equality.
Black Americans have consistently been viewed as “others,” most soberly outlined in Killing the Black Body, by Dorothy Roberts, and A Knock at Midnight, by Brittany K. Barnett.
“Othering,” as we’ve seen, has also led to targeted environmental racism and rapid decline.
Given our history, equality is—and has been—about the United State’s righting its wrongs. By turning a blind eye to the past, we can’t understand the inequality that exists today.
If we continue to turn a blind eye to redlining and the creation of “undesirable” neighborhoods, we can’t understand the environmental racism and rapid decline that exists today.
Sad to say, but nearly a century after the New Deal, and a half-century after MLK’s speech, many Black Americans are not only trying to cash a check marked insufficient funds, but they are being polluted and poisoned on their way to the bank.
Though long overdue, what the EPA is doing—seeking to address it’s culpability in the health consequences of environmental racism—may be too little too late. At this point, much of our infrastructure is predicated on exploiting the vulnerable.
In the words of Jabari Asim in We Can’t Breathe, “Human beings haven’t developed moral sophistication; we’ve merely gotten more practiced at developing rationales for our immorality.”
The EPA’s change of heart may be good for optics, but is that all it is? Where do we go from here?
The mapping Inequality Project is elevating the visibility of our racist past that got us to where we are today. In addition to work that has already been done and is currently being done, (e.g., Race for Profit, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, The Color of Law, by Richard Rothstein, and The Whiteness of Wealth, by Dorothy A. Brown), this project is helping to make more transparent the throughline connecting our past to the present while many others work to rationalize it away.